The Man
by RubyGloom7
Summary: Morgan is remembering the first date his mother had after the divorce, and other things that came after. [Ah, I couldn't help myself. This is a feel-good type of story, with much family fluff, according to my proofreader. It is a story about family and about a son's love.]


**A/N:** Robin's previous husbando isn't mentioned by name in my story, but you're welcome to take a guess or just to give him your preferred identity.

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 **The Man**

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The day I first met the man I had been washing the dishes. I would do this with mom, normally, but she had eaten in a hurry and asked me sheepishly, with a pretty-girl blush, if I didn't mind doing the dishes alone while she went to take a bath. I didn't care, of course. She had been looking tired since she got home from work. Or, as I liked to think of it, prison for the tiny. My mom worked at a daycare center, the Little Bean Sprouts Daycare, if I remember correctly. It was a name like that. She got a proposition from a friend of hers to start a place like that and - I'm sure her friend hadn't intended for me to hear this, but they'd been talking over coffee for so long that they got lost and didn't notice me coming out of my room - it would be a good step for her, for my mother, to get back on track with her life, after the divorce and everything else.

I was implicit in the _everything else_ that Olivia talked about. She had a boy of about my same age and apparently he was going through this stage. He was flirting with girls a lot, and already he'd gotten himself a couple of dates, is what I heard from Olivia. She could only guess it was the same with me, I suppose, but nothing could have been further from the truth. My only female friend, at the time, if I could even call her that, was a grumpy girl who sat by my side during lunch at school. We talked sometimes, but I think she only sat next to me because for some reason she always got to the cafeteria when most seats were already taken. She probably hadn't wanted to seat near anybody else. Perhaps I looked the least intimidating guy around.

I remember the impressions I gave myself when I used to catch glimpses of myself as I got out of the tub after taking a shower. Thin, stick doodle like, gawky in a yellowish towel tied around the waist. I'd let the towel drop. I was just starting to grow pubic hair. I'd grimace at what I saw. A bony bird boy with skin clinging to him like spandex, wrinkled like a raisin after having spent too much time soaking in my own grime. I was too pale too, like my mother. But my mother was like an ivory statue with healthy flushed cheeks, I was just a sick-looking ghost with bags under my eyes.

I was nothing like the man. He was tall and toned, muscled. Muscles on his crossed arms that looked as if the sleeves of his shirt couldn't contain. I had this nagging funny feeling that maybe that wasn't even his shirt, because it'd looked too small for him. Our house looked too small for him too.

I had been washing dishes, as I said, so my hands were still a little soapy when I rushed to open the door, three knocks after the first. He had towered over me, though by the way he conducted himself into the house I guessed he was trying to make himself smaller. His shoulders were somewhat slouched forward as he sat on the chair by the door - the one that my mother had put there to serve as replacement after she lost the carved coat rack in the divorce. She'd loved that thing, though it was kind of a relic from my father's side. So naturally she let him keep it, but I could see that she missed it. She never got around to getting a new one.

I hadn't known where else to put him. Hear me, talking about him like he was a thing, surplus that had to be put on sale or else I wouldn't be able to get rid of him. He felt too foreign to have around, and he looked even funnier sitting where I'd indicated him with my perhaps too low murmur of, she'll be right out. Afterwards, I dried the dishes with deliberate slowness, so I wouldn't have to make up a lame excuse to not talk with him. It's not that I disliked him instantly, but you'd have to understand how awkward that situation was for me. He was my mother's first date, that I knew, after the divorce. She'd take me out to eat sometimes, but that didn't count. I was her son. I didn't know where they'd go, what they'd do, or when she'd return home. What was a divorced woman supposed to do in a first date? I couldn't see her acting like the women in movies. You know what I mean. I couldn't see _my mother_ in a date, period.

I couldn't see the man in a date either. Somehow he looked too rugged for that sort of thing. His hair was a mess, though, I would later learn, there was nothing he could do about it. It was just part of his heritage. He looked like a coal miner. Actually, there was a stain not very well hidden by the collar of his too-small button up. Again, I didn't think it was really his. It was too clear for him. Something dark blue would have suited him more, maybe. He wasn't having an easy time either. Various minutes after I'd gotten back to my chore in the kitchen I looked back at him and he'd gotten up. He wasn't walking around, probably thinking it'd be rude to meander in a house that wasn't his. I was thinking I was supposed to offer him something. Coffee maybe, because that's the habit I'd learned from my mother. Whenever her friend, Olivia, came over and she was busy doing something else she'd ask me to prepare her some coffee and offer her biscuits. We loved biscuits.

But I just couldn't picture what kind of snacks the man liked, if he liked snacks at all. I couldn't see him eating food, period, so I got the idea in my head that dinner out wasn't what their date would be about. My mother didn't like watching movies with a crowd either, saying that the movies coming out those days had nothing but shock value, and the movies that were worth a watch should be either watched alone or shared with only the ones that are close and have good tastes. You have good tastes, she'd say to me and we'd sit down to watch documentaries about real people, and listen to their real stories. We didn't have many movies to watch in the house. Classics, mostly. We watched our movies in my room, since that's where the tv was kept. I didn't watch it much, and we didn't have cable, but I had lots of video games to keep myself entertained. RPGs, mostly.

What were they to do, anyways? I wanted to ask him, where are you taking her? What are you gonna do? And, though embarrassing, what are you gonna do to her? I could still not bring myself to say anything to him though. I felt it'd be rude to leave him there alone and go to my room, since I'd have to walk by him and I didn't know what kind of face to make. Should I just ignore him and walk by as if he wasn't even there? I imagined that would give the impression that I disliked him and didn't want to see him again in our house, but, much as the idea punched me in the gut, I knew that I wasn't enough. It was just the two of us in the house, my mother and I, and since dad had moved out - this, way before the divorce was concluded - it was very silent. My mother had gotten the habit of telling me how much she loved me, how I was the most important thing in the world to her, and though I knew she was sincere, the words had gotten so repetitive they started making me embarrassed. Like when mothers give big, wet kisses to their kids when they drop them off at school, I felt like that. I didn't think it was normal anymore, and I didn't say it very often to her anymore either.

Did that man say it to her? No, I thought. That would only be their first date. Of course he hadn't told her he loved her. _Yet_. I tried imagining the movement of his lips, how he'd say it. But he was a statue. I simply couldn't see him doing anything at all. What did my mother see in this man? How did they meet, actually? I would know, later, that the man worked at a flower shop. Of all places for a man like him to work at, he worked at a flower shop. It was just a temporary thing, my mother told me many dates after the first, when she began to see him more often and they were beginning to talk of moving in together, he had just moved from another city and he didn't know anyone. He saw an ad in the paper one day, and since nobody else seemed to need or want him, that's where he ended up.

Temporary turned into permanent, however. He got comfortable. He liked what he did in that job and what that job gave him - my mother. That's where they'd met. I could see it happening in my mind, her, entering the shop, wearing maybe a candle-white dress, the one she'd bought for herself on her first birthday with only me for company, and him, looking up and his eyes widening at the sight of her, the sun at her back, surrounded by flowers. It's stupid, I know, but I tried picturing the moment so many times that eventually this is the version I came to accept. I liked it.

I started liking him eventually too. There was a shift in the atmosphere when my mother came out of her room, where she'd been changing. I completely forgot to tell her that her date had arrived, tense and awkward as I'd felt, so she was very surprised when she came out, barefooted, hair only half done, curled I mean, and the question in her lips died suddenly as the man turned to look at her, silently but with surprise also splattered ungracefully all over his face. She'd been trying to ask me to help her zip up, with her hands fumbling at her back. She blushed redder than her make up already made her cheeks and then she scrambled quickly back into her room, murmuring apologies all the way. I didn't feel so self-conscious after that, my mother having made herself look more awkward than me, and apparently neither did the man. He even talked to me. She's always like that, isn't she? he asked me, though I could tell it wasn't really a question. It felt more like a private joke, between me and him, and her. Like we all knew perfectly well how she was, like we'd been together for ages and there was nothing to feel bad about, it was good to laugh about ourselves.

That's when I started liking him, or at least, feeling less cross. I wasn't sulky, like a kid. I was apprehensive, you have to understand, and therefore annoyed. I had gotten used to it being just the two of us, and then this man came and got himself wedged in her schedule, right on the spot she reserved for puzzle-solving with me. I know it sounds like a strange hobby to have and share, specially in our days, with computers and cable and movies and phones and all that other stuff people 'can't live without'. Even stranger still is the fact that I did this with my mother, not even with some pretty girl I'd taken a liking to. But there was no pretty girl. Only Severa, the girl from the cafeteria, who wasn't my definition of pretty girl. I didn't dislike her, but I only liked her the way all guys like girls at that age, when they start growing breasts and shaving their legs and armpits and wearing bras with fasteners that you can see showing through the fabric at their backs. The mere sight used to make me go stiff all over. And I do mean all over.

Sitting by Severa had turned into a nightmare at one point, when I could no longer ignore the form of her body. She didn't have the most feminine figure around, but she was the most feminine thing I'd ever gotten close to. She had lean, athletic legs that showed through her leggings. She was a runner, and that made wonder why she was always so late at the cafeteria. It was none of my business, of course, but I was curious. Everything having to do with women made me curious. And Severa's body, always something like a bird perched and perfectly balanced on a high branch, made me mighty curious. Why did I have to feel that way? is what I asked myself almost every night before falling asleep, when the unfamiliar aches of a new foreign body kept me turning.

It felt strange, to touch myself, but not entirely bad. There was a rush to how I did things, always, fearing that my mother would come into my room for one or other reason and catch me. I was very paranoid. It wasn't hard for me to hear her steps through the house, her sighs, her hushed fights with my father when he'd still been around, and then her sobs after he left… so what guaranteed me that she couldn't hear me breathe out that strangled breath full of raspiness after I was finished calming myself for the night? The worst was sneaking out of my room later, times that I made a mess, to put my clothes or my sheets at the very bottom of a pile of dirty laundry.

I had many reasons to feel embarrassed, those days. Standing side by side with the man made me feel even worse about my body. His shadow alone would have been more intimidating than me if put in a situation where I needed to defend myself. That made me glad, in a very muted way. My mother was going out with a man who looked dependable and strong at least. The only unanswered question that night regarded what they would be doing. Not his patience, or tolerance, nothing like that about his character. He'd proven himself to be pretty much impervious to the passage of time, as he waited for my mother to get ready. Slowly he had started to look less stone-like, until his hands finally undid themselves from the knot over his chest and fell to rest with his fingers slightly dipped into his pockets. He had gotten fixated on a bouquet of bunched flowers in a clay vase sitting on this small table by the window opposite him.

She likes them, eh? he asked me. It sounded like he really wanted my opinion, and that made me glad. I don't know if I would have ever been able to like him if he'd asked me something that made me feel belittled that night, when we first met each other. I could sense he wanted to include me in whatever it was he wanted with my mother - a good sign, that. Yes, I told him. That was one of her favorite spots in the house, and she wouldn't put anything on that table unless she really liked it, because she would spend many hours sitting by that table reading.

I gave them to her, he told me.

I always wondered whether it was normal or not that they told me so much. It had never been like that when my father was still around. He and my mother had been a quiet couple, reserved, like my mother defended herself. But I knew that wasn't really her. There were many things she gave up for my father, though she wouldn't tell me what those things were. It hurt her to think about it, maybe. It was only during really bad days that she let the bitterness get the best of her, then she'd tell me how he, my father, had never made an effort. How it was her who had to cave most times, and she'd just gotten tired of letting him come out on top each time. She was fine doing it at first, she told me, because it had made her happy to make him happy, but she hadn't known he never felt the same towards her. She told me to learn from her.

I guess that's what it was about when they talked to me, my mother and the man. At this point it must sound strange the way I keep calling him _the man_ , but that's just the way I came to see him. Whenever something needed to be fixed around the house, or when annoying telemarketers called, or when my mother started looking sad, he was there, he was the man. He was the man too when I started growing hair on my face. He was at my back the first time I shaved, and I also felt him watching me the day I got married.

It's like they were a constant presence in the back of my head, their voices always only a thought away. They talked to me about many things in my life as I grew, taught me, I mean. My first lesson from the man began that very night when he knocked on the door to pick up my mother. It was a lesson on how not to let myself be intimidated and how to more-or-less conceal the fact that I may be sweating bullets and that I may have gotten my shoulder bruised when a pot full of dirt fell on me earlier that day at the flower shop, and there'd been no time to clean myself up, and I had to borrow a shirt from a coworker.

He had been nervous, he'd confess to me years later. Not exactly because of my mother, but because he really had wanted me to like him. He had known my mother liked him, no question, but she wasn't going to take him in unless I was okay with that.

I didn't immediately just start thinking of him as part of the family though, until this one time when I came back from school and he was already there in our house, and I saw him kissing her. He wasn't kissing her lips, like you'd imagine when the word kiss pops up. She'd been trying to change a lightbulb that was clearly out of her reach, she explained to me. And then she fell from the chair she'd been standing on her toes on, and it was the man who cleaned her bruised knee, and that's how I found him, kissing her knee. That's when he took solid form, I guess. He wasn't a visitor anymore, one who only came from time to time but never stayed the night. He had turned into a reality. Very seamlessly he'd crossed that line from being _just_ my mother's boyfriend. He was something to me too now.

That same day, I found myself at the dinner table telling mom that I'd need new shoes and other stuff, and she looked at me like I was growing at will, and that I wanted to run her ragged with trips to the mall. Of course I wasn't growing to pester her, but she was busy that whole week planning special events at the daycare center, so I'd have to wait.

I'll take him, he said. He'd been there with us. That was the first night he dined with us. I've got time, he reassured my mother. Shouldn't be many things, right? he asked me. I swear this next part wasn't something I did intentionally, but my lips moved on their own, like when people think they're alone and start singing tunes they're very fond of, and they know the lyrics so well they don't even think about them when they say them aloud.

Thanks, dad - that's what I said. I had called him dad. It took me a few seconds to even realize what I'd said. A delayed stiffness took over me - it was a different type of stiffness of body, it wasn't like a 'man's stiffness' - and I was looking for other things to say to cover it up. It was useless though. I'd said it. I'd wanted to say it for a while now, if anything to make my mother happy because I knew she still wasn't sure I accepted the man in our lives. I'd planned scenarios in my head. I had even started muttering the word in private. In the mornings, after brushing my teeth, for example, I'd look at myself and say the word. Dad, I'd mutter, feeling weird. You'd imagine I'd be practicing introducing myself to girls, like, hey, or hi, or how do you do? What's your name? Wanna go out? But no, somehow that felt even more embarrassing than practicing how to call somebody dad again.

I screwed up in the end, anyways. It just came out of me. Nobody said anything after. My mother didn't protest to the man's offer - now my dad -, but I think I saw her trying to hide her smile behind the rim of her glass. As for the man… I couldn't look at him. I don't know what face he had.

Then it's settled, is all he said. It sounded strange somehow, though. There was a tone in his voice I only heard from him after a job well done - repairing a chair's leg, cleaning the bathroom, changing a tire, etc. It was like satisfaction. It was settled, I thought, and he wasn't referring to taking me to buy new clothes.

My mother started smiling more often after that. The only occasions I can think of when she smiled even more beautifully than that time, I can count them on the fingers of one palm. One, my college graduation. Two, the day she found she was pregnant again. Three, the day I married. Four, the day my baby sister was born. Five, the day of her second wedding.

But I completely left out the smile she wore on the night of their first date, didn't I? I guess I got completely sidetracked here, what with all the things I remember from when I was younger. Still, I don't know how I forgot. She was radiant. She had this natural beauty about her. But I'm very biased in saying that. This is my mother I'm talking about. I could have asked the man though, and I'm sure he would have agreed with me that no-one could match her. But I guess he would have been biased too.

When she was finally ready and left me with a kiss on the top of my head, and I stood there, simply watching her walk with him to the door, slightly cold, it was the man who stopped her and whispered something to her. She looked back at me, apologetic. Morgan, honey, she began, this is Lon'qu. He'll make sure it isn't too late when I come back.

Morgan, he said my name and extended his hand to me. I took it and he shook our hands, while I felt I couldn't do anything but let the man do as he wished. Such was the strength of his grasp. Nice to meet you, he said. It's just as your mother says. I'll bring her back early, so you don't have to worry.

I just nodded. I didn't know it at the time but, since the moment he came into our lives, he'd keep his word. I wouldn't have to worry about mom ever again.


End file.
